2015-16 Season 13
4th Annual Hothouse New Play Development Series
Oct 2015 and Apr 2016
Over the course of the season, our Hothouse Readings will take place at the Anacostia Playhouse and will be followed by a discussion with the playwright, director, and artists with an emphasis on audience feedback.
A multi-faceted project, the Hothouse serves as an intellectual incubator—a place where local playwrights can nurture and grow their ideas, sustained and supported through collaboration with our staff and artists in the DC Metro Area.
“For Season 13, we asked the DC playwriting community to propose pieces for development. Pieces that delve into and explore the diverse lives and experiences of DC residents. With such an incredible response of new work and ambitious playwrights, this year’s Hothouse Series is quickly becoming one of the most exciting projects to emerge on DC stages in recent memory.” – Kat White, Literary Director
Alan Sharpe’s PLAY BALL
October 5, 2015 at 8:00 PM
Travis is smart. Like, really smart. He’s so smart that no one knows what to do with him – not his mother, not his mother’s boyfriend, not his teacher, and definitely not the other kids his age. So they label him. In Alan Sharpe’s surprisingly funny and gut-wrenching new play, the ways in which Travis copes with bullying, isolation, and confusion about his identity are called into question, along with the world that labels him.
Alan Sharpe is the founding artistic director of African-American Collective Theater (ACT). He began creating LGBTQ-themed projects in 1970 as a freshman film student at Boston University. An on-campus theater company he co-founded there, evolved into African-American Collective Theater after his move to Washington, DC in 1976. Since that time, he has written and directed over seventy plays and films, all showcasing contemporary Black gay and lesbian life and culture. In 1993 he wrote the film “Party” — an AIDSFilms Production in association with Gay Men of African Descent Later, he both wrote and directed the serial drama, “Chump ChangeS” — one of the first narrative fiction web series by an African-American artist on the internet. In addition to fellowships in theater and Larry Neal Awards in dramatic writing from the D.C. Commission of the Arts, he was selected to participate in the 2008 Kennedy Center Playwrights’ Intensive. He is also the recipient of awards from the Gay and Lesbian Activists’ Alliance (GLAA), Us Helping Us (UHU) and a 2013 Prism Award, for his collective body of work in support of the African-American LGBTQ community. He is proud to be a charter member of Brave Soul Collective (BSC), the African-American Playwrights’ Exchange (APEX) and Urban Playwrights’ United (UPU). In 2012, he was honored to have an inaugural Legacy Award named after him, by the DC Black Theater Festival.
Dane Figueroa Edidi’s ABSALOM
October 12, 2015 at 8:00 PM
In the Kingdom of David, Tamar and Bathsheba, as all women, are to be seen and not heard, even in the face of cruelty. A beautifully rendered retelling of the biblical story of Tamar by Dane Figueroa Edidi, Absalom looks far back into antiquity to make connections with the ways in which women, specifically women of color, are silenced by their communities through manipulation and violence.
Dane Figueroa Edidi Dubbed Lady Dane “The Ancient Jazz Priestess of Mother Africa,” Lady Dane is an African, Cuban and Native American performance artist, author (Yemaya’s Daughters, Baltimore:ALoveLetter & Brew), dancer, choreographer, playwright, columnist, Oracular Consultant, advocate, healer, a member of Trans Women of Color Collective Leadership Team, a volunteer at Casa Ruby, Cohost of Inside Out Radio, and a founding member of Force/Collision. Growing up singing jazz and gospel, she began studying classical music at the Baltimore School for the Arts and received a bachelor’s in music from The Catholic University of America. An actor, singer, dancer and writer she began producing her own cabarets at the age of seventeen and made her New York cabaret Debut in 2011. After beginning to study the Dances of her Ancestors at Mamasita Studio, she began combining African, Latin and Native American rhythms to her shows. Although primarily known for her explosive style of cabaret, Lady Dane is a passionate actor who has worked at such theaters as the Kennedy Center, Adventure Theater, Round House Theater, Theater for the New City, Spooky Action Theater, Arena Stage, and LaMama in New York in which she originated the role of Madame Cordelia Mcclain.She has produced two readings (2013 (DC): 2015 (NYC)) of her new musical Roaring (music by Andrew Morrissey), and premiered a workshop of her one woman show Klytmnestra at SpookyAction Theatre. A Poet, and advocate for Trans Voices in the arts she became the first Trans Woman of Color in DC published author of a work of fiction In 2015. She was featured as one of the 2015 Trans 100, and was featured in Huffington Post’s 10 trans names to know.
Chinita L. Anderson’s WE R PUNK ROCK
October 26, 2015 at 8:00 PM
For Lauren, Kiz, and Unique punk is freedom. But does that freedom cost too much? Chinita L. Anderson’s play about The Nina’s, an all-female, all-black punk band in the early 1990’s, mixes a punk musician’s energy with a nuanced understanding of how women of color see and are seen in the world, all in the hopes of shattering those expectations and carving out new identities.
Chinita L. Anderson is a playwright and proud member of the Dramatists Guild of America based in Washington, DC. Her plays are dedicated to exploring the diverse experiences of women of color, particularly Black women. She’s currently working on a 4-play cycle that delves into the lives of a family of Black women from the 1970s to 2000s.
Kitty Felde’s WESTERN & 96TH
April 11, 2016 at 8:00 PM
Kitty Felde spent most of her professional career as an award-winning public radio journalist. She is currently the host and creator of the Book Club for Kids podcast and won the 2009 LA Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Adaptation of a trio of Nikolai Gogol short stories called GOGOL PROJECT, a commission from the Rogue Artists Ensemble. The LA Times said Felde “deftly balances flights of whimsy and depths of darkness.” She also won the Open Book/Fireside Theatre Playwriting Competition for her one-woman show ALICE: an evening with the tart-tongued daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, which played to sell-out houses at the 2011 Capitol Fringe Festival. The Washington Post named it “critic’s pick.” Her courtroom drama A PATCH OF EARTH, winner of the Maxim Mazumdar New Play Competition, was inspired by her work covering the war crimes tribunals, and it is published by the University of Wisconsin Press in The Theatre of Genocide: Four Plays about Mass Murder in Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, and Armenia. Kitty co-founded Theatre of NOTE in Hollywood, wrote for TV’s What’s Happening Now, and directed a playwriting program in LA for at-risk youth. She served as a judge for the Helen Hayes Awards and blogs regularly for the LA Female Playwrights Initiative. Kitty is currently working on her second middle grade novel.
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